Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

8.30.2016

“The Story of Marie and Julien”: Un homme, une fantôme, un chat

A ghostly Emmanuelle Beart in Marie and Julien.

My
education in the films of Jacques Rivette continues. As I understand it Rivette had been trying to
make The Story of Marie and Julien since
the 1960s, at that point to star Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, but the film
never materialized until 2003. It was to
be one of his last completed films. It
shares a similar formal quality with Rivette’s Secret Defense (1998), a revenge thriller that has the detached feel
of a mathematical proof. Marie and Julien is enlivened by the
fact that it’s both a love story and a ghost story. Marie and Julien’s love affair is in the
Romantic/Gothic tradition of Pelléas and
Melisande, Vertigo, and
Washington Irving’s “Adventure of the German Student,” with an ending that owes
something to fairy tales like Pinocchio and
The Velveteen Rabbit: the undead
Marie (Emmanuelle Beart), moved to tears by the suffering of her lover Julien (Jerzy
Radziwilowicz), magically regains her mortality. It’s too reserved and sane to be top-tier
Rivette, but its restraint is appropriate to the somberness of the plot, and it
has an erotic edge that one normally doesn’t encounter in his films—with the
possible exception of La Belle Noiseuse.

The Story of Marie and Julien: Nevermore (Gaspard) in the clock.

The other thing Marie and Julien has going for it is a fantastic animal performance
by a tuxedo cat named Gaspard (he looks a little like Disney’s Figaro), who steals
nearly every scene in which he appears as Julien’s pet cat Nevermore (!), often
by clambering on top and inside of the elaborate clocks that Julien works to
repair. While they don’t play as significant
a role in his films as they do in those of, say, Chris Marker, cats tend to be
associated with magic throughout Rivette’s work. Joe Dallesandro dandles a kitten in Merry Go Round,a stray cat acts as a witness to the antics
of Celine and Julie Go Boating (and
is given the final word of that film, as it were, by appearing in the last
shot), and in Marie and Julien
Nevermore’s acrobatics lead Marie to discover a cache of secret documents. In the pantheon of cats of the nouvelle
vague, Gaspard is no Zgougou or Guillaume-en-Egypte (how could he be?), but he’s
remarkable all the same.